Even tho mattcutt's says there is no weight given to .edu or .gov links, I think their is and I'll quickly outline how You can find backlinks yourself.

you all should know that google search has a few commands that will get info on your site.. such as

site:blackhatworld.com

will ( in theory ) show all indexed pages from the url "blackhatworld.com"

Google announced a few years ago that this command is messed up, but even today, you can get a good idea of your indexed pages in google.

another one is

link:blackhatworld.com

this will show all backlinks that google has indexed for your site..

and there is
inurl:keyword

this will show all links with "keyword" in the url

okay, to the fun stuff..

If you have ever been to wikipedia, you know that anyone can edit a page.. Usually it'll get kicked back to the default setting, but it is possible to edit them.. Some ppl don't keep their wiki's as strict..

go to google and put this in the search box.

Code:

site:.edu inurl:wiki

you'll find a bunch of .edu sites that a student or class has added a wiki.. Sometimes you can find good pages to leave your link on.

and then, if you want to get a little more targeted, use this command

Code:

site:.edu inurl:wiki "blackhatseo"

and change the "blackhatseo" to "yourniche"

if you know a better way of sorting these, please post them..

here are a few that will find blogs.

Code:

site:.edu inurl:blog

so this shows a bunch of blogs.. but you don't want to waste time searching for blogs you can comment on.. So you narrow it down with this.

Code:

site:.edu inurl:blog ?post a comment?

and sometimes the blog owner has closed the comments, so you want to search this to narrow the closed blogs out.

Code:

site:.edu inurl:blog ?post a comment? -"comments closed?

okay, so this is getting close to the perfect starting spot, well your wrong..
Some blogs make you login to comment.. so lets remove those too.

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